Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Okay, da!

Three questions.

1. Is it somehow cooler to write “da” instead of “the” and “nd” instead of “and”?2. If not, how difficult can it be to key in an extra letter?3. What kind of twisted mind abbreviates words like "the" but spells out "illuminate" and "prosperous" in full?

37 comments:

You can look at it from the point of view of information theory ... saving one letter from a word that occurs frequently gives better compression than saving a couple of letters from 'illuminate'. And SMS sending is all about compressing into the 160 letter limit, isn't it?

On a different note, I just spent an entire day going through a couple of years' worth of your blog. Top Notch stuff...

Exactly my sentiments. Similarly, is it necessary to write 'Ma' instead of 'My'? Its fine that you love your mother a lot, but does she have to make an appearance everywhere?The other thing is can't stand is people writing LiKe tHis. :(

Akshay: you've been thinking about this way too long, haven't you? Seriously though, I enjoy the 160-character limit myself - it's fun to edit/rewrite longish SMSes to fit the limit (without abbreviating words or using slang - though of course that can always be used as a last resort).

Neha: sorry, can't sympathise with your yearning for smog. Smog goes hand in hand with crackers, and I have a pup at home who's traumatized by all the noise.

shrikanth: yes, "anyways" is one of my pet peeves. But it's so ubiquitous now that I wouldn't be surprised if the Oxford English Dictionary made it the official spelling soon. Then we'll be wrong!

On a tangent, this is super annoying as well - 'babes'. Anyone watching tv today can hear it popping up in the pop-soaps and ads, mouthed by just anyone old enough to flip their phones or wax their legs.

Also, it is important to know where to draw the line. Languages need to evolve and are not frozen in stone. Yet, evolution by its very definition must address an existing deficiency. Else it makes little sense.

Words like 'pundit', 'almirah' and 'juggernaut' clearly enriched the English language when they were coopted a few hundred years ago. One cannot say the same thing about SMS jargons.

Also, there is this fascination for using foreign words instead of homespun ones. For instance, the use of Latin words like 'expedite' and 'eliminate' instead of the Saxon alternatives 'hasten' and 'remove'. George Orwell wrote about this in his essay - Politics and the English Language

There are plenty of urban myths about texting. You might want to read David Crystal's book - Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. Or read about it on his blog here: http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-txtng-reactions.html

Ever since my 6 month stint at Bangalore this year, I can't get through messages which have 'da' in it without imagining how my friendly neighbourhood Kannadiga dosa-waala would've read the message out loud to me.

As for the smog in Delhi, I know it can be quite a pain but what the hell, it seems it'll be quite high on the mind of the Australians at the Kotla!! Go SMOG!! :D

Interesting discussion, and I must admit that it does tend to give me a mild headache to read thru words such as the 'd' and then words with no vowels. I do like a language that is not dictated by an Oxford Dictionary, and one that is treated as a living thriving democratic body of work, but that does not mean I like every expression of freedom that is thrown in the public domain.

Just finished reading a very enjoyable Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, which talks about how the language has evolved - it does help put things in perspective.

re your question as to why 'the' was butchered and 'illuminate' spared: i don't think that its impossible to compress words like 'illuminate' (try 'ilmn8') or 'prosperous'. its just that words like 'and' & 'because' are so common that even their abbreviations can be understood. remember, these festive SMSs are most often sent to the entire phone book in one go, which may include people with varying degrees of comfort with the english language. so simple words are compressed, and words which the public at large would have difficulty with are left in their original glory, causing some to reach for the dictionary, others to forward the same message on, and a small suffering minority to savagely hit the delete button

...mouthed by just anyone old enough to flip their phones or wax their legs

shiny tiny satellite: these days that would mean anyone over the age of 7, right?

...evolution by its very definition must address an existing deficiency. Else it makes little sense.

shrikanth: I'm not sure the idea behind SMS-ese is to make sense anyway!

Also, there is this fascination for using foreign words instead of homespun ones. For instance, the use of Latin words like 'expedite' and 'eliminate' instead of the Saxon alternatives 'hasten' and 'remove'.

You mean for people who are originally from the UK? For Indians, technically speaking Saxon words are just as foreign as Latin ones.

My nephew currently in the US learning to fly, left this message which I completely misunderstood till I saw the pictures! "I added ma solo pix" made me wonder why he'd added his mom's pictures.I later understood that I'm indeed a 20th century person!

And shudder, according to a recent article, the Maharashtra Board is planning on doing away with penalties for spelling mistakes, as long as the semantics/context of the incorrectly spelt word is understood by the examiner. PS : I'm apparently too archaic for my spell-check: it seems to think "spelt" is ummm, spelled wrong, heh.

I beg 2 differ! isnt brevity the basis of evolution and by extension the whole pt of logic? SMS'g lingo is jst reflective of a new psyche - one of making the most of limited resources; be it in terms of time, words or money (/space)! I can understand the avg person's irritation wid short-forms tht dont make sense - eg: above quoted "ma" instead of "my", but what i dont understand is y educated and so-called intellectually progressive ppl dnt c d the other side of evolution - its shorter, faster and yet gets d msg across. Pardeon me, but arnt we jst behaving like our granparents did wen jeans came up as the young person's attire of comfort rather than d traditional kurta pyjama!

BM: that's a fair enough perspective. A couple of points: 1) this post (and more especially the earlier, longer one I linked to) wasn't written in a finger-wagging, righteous tone - it was mostly intended to be funny/lighthearted. (I can't speak for any of the comments by others, of course.) At a personal level I do get very irritated by incessant use of SMS-ese, but it isn't my intention to get moralistic about it.

2) with reference to arnt we jst behaving like our granparents did wen jeans came up as the young person's attire of comfort rather than d traditional kurta pyjama, yes, we probably are (and a closer analogy would be my discomfort with young people wearing low-waist pants and high-rise branded underwear). But why should we simply assume in every such case that we are the ones living in an enlightened, evolved age while our grandparents were all clueless old fogeys who were blindly resistant to change? Some of their arguments may have been just as appropriate/provocative in their times as the discussions we're having here.

its shorter, faster and yet gets d msg across

Nope, it doesn't always get the message across in the shortest and most efficient way. Reading longish messages/emails written in this style is a bit like reading A Clockwork Orange and it usually takes me a lengthy time to interpret them. Or maybe I just need to "evolve"!

Stretching BM's point a little -She seems to be suggesting that as a society, we always get better with time in all areas of human endeavour.This assumption is used to justify the most nonsensical of cultural changes including SMS lingo.

However, such contemporary-centrism is uncalled for. If it were true, the Dark medieval ages of Europe would not have succeeded the more advanced Hellenic and Roman civilizations! Marxist thought would not have succeeded the freewheeling capitalism (which has aged much better) advocated in the early nineteenth century.

So it's pretty clear that human societies do not always get 'better' with time. Especially in matters of culture and art.

PS: When it comes to the hard sciences things are a little different. One can actually discern a continuous accretion of scientific knowledge over the centuries.

As a journo this shouldn't bother you at all. Remember the times of wiring news to the press, when you were charged by the word. And one day you had nothing to report you messaged "unnews" and your boss wrote back "unpay" :D

Jai - tht's fair enough. I did not intend to suggest a self-righteous tone and my apologies if that came across as my impression of ur post. I have been following your blog for a few months now and wit is a key essence that keeps me glued!:-) However, a few to-notes:1> "why should we simply assume in every such case that we are the ones living in an enlightened, evolved age while our grandparents were all clueless old fogeys"Actually, we aren't! What I am suggesting is that we should'nt oppose change just because it is not in-line with our view of what is correct/perfect. Not all change is good, but that doesnot translate into a reverse negative.2> "Nope, it doesn't always get the message across in the shortest and most efficient way." From personal experience, in atleast 90 out of 100 cases it does. I am not refering to an idiotic mere substitution kind of sms-ese but the more subtle 'c' for 'see', 'u' for 'you' version tht at one level does away with redundancies inherent in the english language and probably even grammar. Again, I am not talking from the perspective of a literary purist but from the point of view of everyday basic communication.

Srikanth: "She seems to be suggesting that as a society, we always get better with time in all areas of human endeavour." - no I am not suggesting any such notion. However, I do believe and please correct me if I am wrong - human society is dynamic; it is constantly evolving and changing. To reiterate my point, change may not always be good but that doesnt mean that all change is going to be bad!"However, such contemporary-centrism is uncalled for. If it were true, the Dark medieval ages of Europe would not have succeeded the more advanced Hellenic and Roman civilizations! Marxist thought would not have succeeded the freewheeling capitalism" - and to extend the argument the medieval ages were succeded by the renaissance as well!

"So it's pretty clear that human societies do not always get 'better' with time. Especially in matters of culture and art." - Maybe not, but who defines better. Probably from an individualistic point of view I'd rather be a citizen of the current world order than the cold-war era. Or even a few decades back when women couldn's vote. Certainly there is charm associated with the times that have passed but I am a little confused about how anyone can take a moralistic high-point and say "those were the good old days"!! Those were the old days and these are the new - whether good or bad is a relative term that can vary depending on which perspective you take.

BM: no problem - it's actually fun when a flippant post or comment encourages stimulating discussions! Like I said before, my mind probably hasn't evolved in the direction of SMS-ese, because I do find it difficult to process a message that is ridden with "c"s and "u"s (for "see" and "you"). And these are just examples of simple, basic short-forms. Anything that's even slightly more complicated requires a constant process of interpretation for me. (Also, when I see a "ur" used in place of "your", as opposed to "you are", my mind starts to short-circuit.)

Really good post, and I totally agree with you. Its all the more annoying when people, in the attempts to sound uber-cool, actually end up misspelling words with the same or more letters than the original ones! Example: hot= hawt, cool=kewl, my-mah and so on.

Latest (and by far the most irritating) addition to this jargon is spelling pictures as "pitchas"!!